The United States is facing myriad crises from child poverty and greed-based inflation to the genocide in Palestine and growing numbers of people being killed by police. School shootings are as common as ever, if not more so, and guns continue to flood our streets unabated. Yet, none of this is part of the current political discourse on any grand scale. They come and they go.
If it feels like political discourse in the U.S. has driven itself to the point of debating, debunking, and denouncing the false claims made by conservatives instead of focusing on policies that will save lives, that’s because it has. Don’t get me wrong, they should be debunked as often as possible, but the overall discourse needs to focus on the reality for many if not most in the U.S.
Everyone in the United States knows by now that immigrants benefit the country socially and economically while also committing far less crime than native-born U.S. citizens. They know that the stories covering everything from Chinese people being responsible for COVID to the apartment complex takeover by Venezuelan gangs in Colorado alongside stories of Haitians eating people’s pets in Ohio are bullshit.
The talk about the increase in crime nationally is a lie in itself, let alone migrants being responsible for it. The latest FBI Quarterly Crime Report speaks for itself.
“A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least two or more common months of data for January through March 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent,” reads the latest FBI Quarterly Crime Report. “Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent. Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent.”
It’s the same story throughout history. Just like racists who spread the same hundred-year-old lies about Black and Indigenous people despite being disproven ad nauseam, some of the lies they use against immigrants today are as old as the U.S. itself. Language like “invasion” and tropes about nonwhite immigrants being criminals, bringing disease, raising housing costs, and even eating pets have existed for centuries and yet, here we are.
Still doing it like it’s going out of style.
Most people seem to be smart about this. Those who know are aware that some people repeat the same old stories because of their blatant racism. Those individuals won’t change their minds because they choose not to. It has always been like this in the United States just as there have always been and always will be willfully ignorant factions in any society.
The question is, how much attention should society give them when so many more important issues are at stake? Because the news media repeats the lies under the guise of “addressing it” more than the perpetrators do. Meanwhile, as racists and bigots were getting the bulk of the attention, things like child poverty nearly tripled between 2021 and 2023, according to a recent U.S. Census report.
It’s a story Stephen Semler covered for the Polygraph newsletter on Substack.
“Federal benefits and tax breaks were taken away during a serious bout of inflation,” writes Semler. “The Census Bureau attributes the increase in child poverty since 2021 to the expiration of pandemic-era anti-poverty programs. For example, the child tax credit lifted 2.4 million people out of poverty in 2023, but the expanded child tax credit moved 5.3 million people above the poverty line in 2021. The expanded version expired in 2022.”
And it almost goes without saying who poverty affects the most in the U.S.
“Of the race and Hispanic origin groups shown … poverty rates were highest for American Indian and Alaska Native (21.2 percent) and Black individuals (17.9 percent),” reads the Census report. “The poverty rate was lowest for non-Hispanic White individuals (7.7 percent).”
We also have to face the fact that the real problems with racism and bigotry in the U.S. are the people who are unwilling to confront their friends, family, or maybe even their kids about their animus or extremist beliefs. We see it in school shooters all too often. We’ve seen it in mass shooters targeting nonwhite groups all over the country. Until so-called “civil society” starts addressing this problem within their homes and workplaces, it will never go away.
Instead, racists and bigots, new and old will continue to repeat the lies they see online which benefit from a level of amplification never seen before. Hatred for anyone that isn’t a white, Christian, male has been the center of conservatism for hundreds of years. The bigoted views espoused by many modern-day Republicans became mainstream on social media and created an avenue for someone like former president Donald Trump to succeed.
He’s a Republican-created monster no matter how much they distance themselves from him.
Giving Trump the biggest platform in the United States, and possibly the world, he was able to normalize more hate than any Klansman ever could single-handedly. Outright disdain for women exploded as did the hatred for Black people, Mexicans (Latinos), immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. Meanwhile, the rebirth of dreams of a white-male-dominated society only grew in popularity among young white men during that time.
We saw all of this on the debate stage on Tuesday. And we’ll continue to see it if society doesn’t start taking the initiative to address it in their proximity first. Fighting with them on social media has only served to amplify their ideas. Mocking them, however, serves a great purpose. There’s nothing a bigot hates more than being made fun of for being stupid. If you want to get under their skin, start giggling when they say something hateful and say, “You can’t say that, that’s racist (or whatever).” Then watch as they start to listen to your why.
It might change their mind, it might not. But they’ll at least know their hate isn’t okay.
Now Watch This
Rep. James McGovern eviscerates House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday for suggesting noncitizens vote not based on fact, but intuition.
Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-VA) destroys Republicans for proposing voters prove their citizenship at polling stations before voting. She called it what it is, a poll tax.
Conservative racism is on full display. And while it is on the ballot, we can not look away from the more pressing issues at stake. As noted many times in my work, Republican lawmakers have been trying to legislate their racism through modern-day versions of Jim Crow laws. Now, they’re striking fear of noncitizens voting to take the right to vote from all poor and nonwhite people.
It’s all white supremacy. Nothing changes except for the targets.
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